Mediating Sacred Kingship: Conversion and Sovereignty in Mongol Iran

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the fashioning of new discourses on authority and sacral kingship in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Mongol-ruled Iran. It examines how Jewish and Muslim (both Shiʿi and Sunni) bureaucrats, court historians, scholars, and courtiers experimented at the Mongol court with Persian and Islamic theological and political paradigms to express, reaffirm, and redefine a Mongol political theology of divine right that invested Chinggis Khan and his offspring with sacral charisma and the charge of world domination. This study argues that in their attempt to mediate the Mongol understanding of the Chinggisid ruler as a source of law and divine wisdom, intermediaries in late medieval Iran laid the foundations for a new idiom of sacral Muslim kingship.

This study focuses on two arenas of engagement and exchange: dynastic succession struggles, and the interreligious, cosmopolitan, and competitive Mongol court environment. Religious interlocutors - mainly Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews - competed over influence and access to the Mongol rulers by demonstrating their skills in explaining and reinforcing the claims of their patrons to their inheritance of Chinggisid authority. Cultural brokers at the Mongol court in Iran ingeniously drew on a rich corpus of Perso-Islamic political and Islamic theological writings, to recast their Mongol patrons as law-maker monarchs, mahdi-reformer rulers, and sacred Muhammad-like kings.

Recent scholarship assigns the emergence of a new type of sacred and messianic Muslim emperor from the fifteenth century onwards to the resurgence of Shi'i and millenarian movements and the proliferation of Sufi and occult discourses following the vacuum in authority created by the fall of the caliphate to the Mongols in 1258. This study, however, argues that it was the Muslim engagement with the Chinggisid claim to exclusive unmediated divine authority that gave rise to a new understanding of the place of kingship in the Islamic salvation narrative. This study is the first, therefore, to uncover the contributions of Mongol political concepts and cultural brokers in late medieval Iran to the sacralization of Muslim sovereignty.